Hard-Line Vietnamese President, Tran Dai Quang, Dies at 61

President Tran Dai Quang of Vietnam, a former police general who presided over a crackdown on free speech in that one-party state, died Friday. He was 61.

The state-controlled Vietnam News Agency said the death resulted from an unspecified “serious illness.”

Nguyen Quoc Trieu, a government doctor, was quoted by the state news media as saying that Quang had died of “a rare and serious viral disease” at a military hospital in Hanoi, the capital.

Quang had fallen ill last July and traveled to Japan six times for treatment, Trieu said.

Vietnam, like China, is governed by an authoritarian Communist Party but promotes a version of state capitalism. Unlike China, where Xi Jinping is both president and Communist Party chief, Vietnam has a power structure in which responsibilities at the top are split among a party chief, a president, who serves as head of state, and a prime minister, who runs the government.

Of the three roles, the president is generally considered the least powerful. Quang, however, was among a group of influential hard-liners who took charge in 2016 during a power transfer that occurs within the party every five years. He was also a former chief of the country’s powerful Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the uniformed police and a network of intelligence agents known to spy on civilians.

Since 2016, top party officials have used the security ministry to intensify an anti-corruption purge against some of their comrades. Some political analysts see the campaign as internal party rivalries spilling out into the open, rather than as a bona fide project to clean up Vietnam’s systemic corruption.

Several former Vietnamese officials declined to comment on Quang’s death when reached by telephone Friday. But on Facebook, Vietnamese intellectuals spoke of him in withering terms. Many criticized him because he supported the passage of a cybersecurity law in June that would require Facebook and other technology companies to open offices in Vietnam and store “important” user data on local servers. Rights groups say such a move would enable further government repression of political dissidents.

“Since Mr. Tran Dai Quang was highly educated, many people had a lot of hope for him,” human rights lawyer Tran Vu Hai said in an interview. But when he took over the security ministry, Hai said, “the situation for dissidents remained the same.”

Tran Dai Quang was born in the northern province of Ninh Binh in 1956, two years after Vietnam shook off colonial rule by defeating the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

In the 1970s, Quang joined the security ministry, through which he rose after earning a doctorate in law. He became security chief in 2011 and received the rank of police general a year later.

He spent the latter part of his career on the party’s elite, 19-member Politburo, which essentially sets the government’s agenda.

The party has never tolerated internal political dissent, but many analysts and human rights activists say that domestic repression has worsened in Vietnam since 2016. Human Rights Watch reported in January that at least 119 people were serving “lengthy” prison terms for expressing views critical of the government, joining banned political organizations or participating in other activities that the party deems a threat.

One theory is that President Donald Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have included Vietnam, decreased the incentive for Vietnam to bend to U.S.-led pressure on human rights issues. The Obama administration had championed the trade agreement as a way to extract concessions from Vietnam on labor and environmental laws, among other things.

Other analysts have linked recent repression in Vietnam to the influence of the Communist Party chief, Nguyen Phu Trong, who is said to have won an internal power struggle against his party rivals ahead of the 2016 shake-up.

In 2015, Trong became the first Vietnamese party chief to visit the White House, a sign that party elites viewed developing better relations with the United States as a priority — and a hedge against China’s growing regional influence. But he is still widely seen as a key proponent within the party of Vietnam’s relationship with China, its northern neighbor and ideological ally.

Quang was one of two senior Communist Party officials who were once thought to be in the running for party chief if Trong, 74, retired before the end of his five-year term, Vietnam expert Carl Thayer wrote in January.

However, Thayer added, last year’s abduction from Germany of Trinh Xuan Thanh, the former head of a state-owned fuel company’s subsidiary, was a “major political embarrassment” for Quang that threatened his chances of becoming party chief.

Thanh was abducted off the streets of Berlin last June. He turned up later on Vietnamese state television to offer a confession. German authorities blamed Vietnam’s intelligence agencies for the operation, and one of Thanh’s lawyers described it to The New York Times as “George Orwell reloaded.”

Quang is survived by his wife and two sons, the state news media said.

It is rare for a sitting Vietnamese president to die in office, and Quang’s death will leave a political vacuum on the Politburo, said Huong Le Thu, an expert on Asian security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. She said the choice could affect which party faction — Trong’s or that of his political rivals — gains the upper hand.